SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 November 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 11 November 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Davidson, Steve
(1958-2026) US fan (active with letters published in SF Magazines as early as 1978), editor and publisher. In 2012 he acquired the then-moribund Amazing Stories (which see), reviving it first as a lively website with a news and reviews blog, then with ebook and webzine issues, and – with help from Kickstarter funding – as a print magazine from August 2018 (#614 dated Fall 2018) to Summer 2020 (#619) with Ira ...
Chiang, Ted
(1967- ) US author who has produced many stories since he began to publish work of genre interest with "Tower of Babylon" in Omni for November 1990, which won the first of his four Nebula awards to date, for best novelette; he also received the John W Campbell Award for best new writer in 1992. His second Nebula was for "Story of Your Life" (in Starlight 2, anth ...
Carlson, Dale
(1935-2022) US author who sometimes published her nonfiction as Dale Bick Carlson; her work is primarily designed for Young Adult audiences, like the Jenny Dean sequence of juvenile mysteries beginning with The Mystery of the Shining Children (1983) and ending with The Secret of the Invisible City (1984). Some of her earlier singletons are of stronger sf interest, such as ...
Compton, Stoney
Working name of Leonard W Compton (? - ), US author and illustrator who began to publish work of genre interest with "Whalesong" in Universe 1 (anth 1990) edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber; another early story is "When the Ship Came" (December 1994 Tomorrow). In his ...
Stemp, Jane
(1961- ) UK author of Waterbound (1995; rev 2021), a Young Adult Near Future Dystopia set in a world beset by Ecological degradation, where the healthy live in grimly regulated Keeps and those who are deemed unfit (see Eugenics) must somehow survive ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book ...